We move out onto the main drag and pass the No Frills, and the hair salon where my mom used to work before she decided to open one in our house. I used to hang out in the basement salon with her, reading old Cosmos and trying out the curling irons and straighteners. I loved the smell of it down there. The hair sprays and permanents and dyes, and how the smells were always on her, even after she showered and changed. It’s different now. Ever since Reg. Now he hangs out down there. He reads the magazines and sits in the hair-washing chair with the footrest and makes comments on all the women in the pictures. He flirts with Mom’s clients and they all laugh at his jokes. They think he is charming and that she is lucky, but they don’t know that he stole my mother from under my nose, just leaving me with one more hole in my life.

We are on the highway now, going fast, Lottie reading beside me as scraps of songs float like pieces of garbage in a wind up from the back of the bus. We drive past a long, low building with a sign for a company called Earth Boring, past offices and plazas and car dealerships and warehouses. I look down at the people in the cars driving beside us and wonder about their lives. Is she going to eat that sandwich later? Why do they have so many blankets in the back seat? How can he stand smoking in the car like that? There is a woman singing along to the radio, and I smile just watching her because she is so into it; she is on stage and not in a little Hyundai Sonata. She shakes her hair about and pounds her palms on the steering wheel.

We reach the recycling plant. It doesn’t look that big from the outside, but I realize later that it is, and that the entrance is almost like the doorway to Bilbo Baggins’s hobbit hole.

A man in safety goggles ushers us into an empty room with tables and chairs and two pop machines. “Okay, now listen up here, because it’s really loud on the tour, so it will be hard to hear me all the time. You’re each going to wear a safety vest and glasses,” he says, while another man walks around with a bin of gear for us to put on. We follow them into the factory, single file. Lottie is in front of me, her messy, crazy hair in all directions, her hands at her sides, in fists.